By Dave Lindorff
Excuse me, but I have to vent here.
Having grown up in a college town (Storrs, CT, home of UConn), and then having attended college in two cities that were not my hometown, in both of which places I voted in local elections (Middletown, CT and New York City), I want to take issue with the candidates, like Hillary Clinton, and the people in the Democratic Party leadership in Iowa, who are claiming it's somehow untoward for a candidate, like Barak Obama in this case, to urge students who are from out of town or , god forbid, out of state to vote in the Iowa caucuses. Officials in other states have made the same kind of complaint.
Students, in case these people haven't noticed, are full-fledged citizens with full rights.
They also have specific issues related to their being students at the university, especially when it's a state school like, say, the University of Iowa--for example the out-of-state tuition rate, the amount of money provided by the state to support higher education in the state, the level of faculty salaries, etc.--and they have every reason, and every right, to be politically active in defending those things.
Historically, communities have fought against letting students register to vote locally, claiming that they are "outsiders." Fortunately the courts have upheld the right of everyone to vote where they live, including students. To criticize Obama for urging students to register and participate in Iowa's Jan. 3 caucuses is the height of hypocrisy.
What Democratic leaders and local people in university communities don't like about students is that they tend to be more liberal and more independent than the average voter, and to be smarter about seeing through hype and tripe.
That's why the Clinton campaign, at least behind the scenes, has reportedly been encouraging criticism of Obama's get-out-the-out-of-state-student vote effort, and why the state's party establishment, which is aligned with Clinton, is also grumbling about it (Obama has proved particularly popular among students). There's some irony here, since Clinton herself was very politically active as a student, and it's a good bet she was registered to vote in Wellesley, MA, where she was a student. Also in New Haven, when she was a law student at Yale.
Let me say that I'm not an Obama supporter myself; I think Dennis Kucinich is clearly the best candidate in this race. But I do smell a rat in this attack on student voters. (Students, by the way, have also been big backers Kucinich in the Democratic, and Ron Paul in the Republican presidential campaigns nationally.)
The truth is, students, regardless of whether they are from in-state or out-of-state, should be encouraged not just to vote in the Iowa caucuses, but to take control of the communities where they are in the majority. In communities where they have done so--Berkeley, CA, Boulder, CO, Ithaca, NY, Burlington, VT, Santa Cruz, CA and Madison, WI, come to mind--they have helped local progressive forces to offer creative new models of local government, and to develop innovative ideas with regard to transportation, environmental protection, and public education, that typical communities have typically shied away from.
We need more, not less, of this kind of community activism.
So don't take any crap, students! You have the right to vote where you live. Use it, and make something of it.
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DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist and columnist. His latest book, co-authored by Barbara Olshansky, is "The Case for Impeachment" (St. Martin's Press, 2006, and now available in paperback). His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net
